wefalck

I actually wondered myself a while ago, since when studded links came into use and down to what size of chain. I think one of the picture of the GREAT EASTERN from the 1850s shows huge studded links for her anchor chain, but small chains even today are not studded. I would agree, however, that the material for the links on the chain above is a bit on the thin end.

Bronze is quite corrosion resistant (depending on its actual composition). There are always trade-offs, but bronze nuts and steel/iron spindles is a common combination in engineering. Here, because of the cast-iron gun, the spindle had to be bronze. Everything would be greased and the crew kept busy maintining everything corrosion-free.

Thanks, gentlemen, much appreciated ! **************************************** Folding tool As will be seen in the next post, quite a number of delicate laser-cut parts will need to be folded. Therefore, I thought a folding tool might come handy. A number of commercial gadgets are available, but considering that they essentially consist of a couple of milled-to shape pieces of aluminium and a thumb-screw, I find them rather overpriced at €20 to €70, depending on what you buy where. Also, if I have the right materials and tools, I prefer to make such things myself. I did not have a suitable piece of flat aluminium in stock, so I decided to make it from some 4 mm thick Plexiglas off-cut. This has the added value that you can better see, where you place the folding edge. Plexiglas is more vulnerable than aluminium, but I can always make a replacement, should the need arise. A set of fingers ranging from 1 mm to 6 mm width were separated by notches made with a 4 mm cutter. The front was bevelled for better access to small parts. The opposite side was left straight for longer parts. For the moment, the front edges where milled at 90° degrees, but I can imagine that a slight overbending would be better. I am considering to mill on a 5° or 10° relief angle, but will first test the piece in practice. A more acute angle will make the edges more vulnerable to chipping. The underside is somewhat recessed over most of the width, so that tool really clamps with the front edge, where it is needed, and does not wobble. As I also did not have material for a base in stock, I decided to use the base of the sanding tool that I made a while ago. It has the added value that no extra gadget is floating around the workshop. The folding ruler was drilled and two corresponding holes in the base were drilled and tapped for M3 thumb-screws.

Or sculpt them from suitable modelling clay ...

This depends on the type of ship you are building. Most had planked deadwood, some not. It depends on, where your rabbet is. If you have to plank the deadwood, you may have to work with stealers there. Bulkheads have nothing to with actual ship construction, but are just a 'fake' for us modellers to provide the shape of the hull. Therefore, the edges of the bulkheads are not necessarily a good indication for where constructional details should be.

If your ship has visible 'wales', you have mark out their lines first. Then you would measure the circumference of the bulkheads between the wales and the lower edge of the keel-rabbet. Likewise you measure the distance from the top of the wales to the lower edge of the capping rail and divide these spaces into equal segments.

The binnacle looks good ! A variant of this technique could be to use wax instead of plasticine/plastiline. Ordinary candle 'wax' (which usually actually is stearine) may be too brittle, but the jewellery-makers have special wax for that purpose, which can be milled and turned. One can also dunk the core repeatedly into varnish or even diluted white glue to build up a layer, if you don't want to use galvanoplastics as some Eastern European colleagues here do.

I may have been colporting wrong information then. Admittedly I do not have the book, but have seen criticism to the effect that it generalises information from just a few sources, mainly Swedish ones. Apologies, I was wrong in this respect.

Could be the basis for a 'third-hand' or a rigging stand, if one replaces the studs with clamps with something more versatile. Perhaps along these lines: Could also become a rotating building stand for a small model, to clamp stem and stern-post.

Remember that Peterson's main source of information seems to have been the models in the Stockholm Maritime Museum. So strictly speaking, what he shows would be Swedish practice at the time the models were rigged or restored (which does not necessarily coincide with the period of the prototype ship).

You are right, nothing looks like metal ... but metal. However, sometimes one has to fake things for various technical reasons. There are/were some really good metallic paints on the market. Plastic modellers prefer the Alclad-brand these days and results are very good. I have a Czech brand of rub-on metallic paint that also gives good results on small surfaces. In the end it will boil down to your workshop kit-out and what materials you can lay your hand on.

Are you using the collet as a rose cutter ? I wouldn't treat my collets like this ... You can take a brass tube of suitable ID and file saw-tooth-like notches into the face. Depending on the wood you are working with, the cutter will need frequent sharpening.

You make me envious with your skills ...

Not at all. Shellac dries to a clear and no-sticky film.

I could think of various other methods, depending on the available tools and materials. Once could, for instance shape the dome from Plexiglas, mill off the flat for the window, paint the whole thing in a good brass paint, then rub off the paint on the flat part and polish it. I have done this recently with a tiny (2 mm diameter) octogonal binnacle cover. Along similar lines, one could paint the Plexiglas dome with a conductive paint and then electroplate it, but that would mean a copper dome. Another method would be to shape the dome externally and internally in brass and then fill it with a high-quality resin (I have, for instance, a cement to make invisible joints in Plexiglas, which essentially is liquid Methacrylate resin). One then can mill off the flat and polish it. However it is difficult to achieve a filling without air-bubbles. I have used a similar method many years ago for making miniature position lanterns by pushing a coloured styrene rod into the brass lantern body and heating it until the rod melted into it. The exess was turned off. The binnacles always had a glass window. The point of a binnacle is to protect the compass from wind and weather while allowing a safe illumination at night. In museum specimens the glass is often missing.

A half-hitch and shellac at the end to prevent unravelling ... once installed, the part can be lightly soaked in dilute shellac or (black/brown) acrylic varnish to secure things. I prefer something that can be softened with solvent in case one needs to make adjustments.

I may be wrong, but I think in the early decades of the 19th century simple boat compasses were used. These were essentially square boxes with the actual compass in a cardanic suspension. As to making this kind of portable binnacle, it depends on what kind of (machine) tools are at your disposal. It would be certainly possible to make the dome from triangular sections, but this would require a pretty could soldering technique. In any case, a wooden plug over which the parts could be held together would be required. If I had to make a binnacle like the one on the first photograph, I would take a piece of brass rod, shape it on the lathe on the outside and then drill it out, using a round burr for the finishing cuts. The lamp would be milled and turned from a piece of brass rod and soldered onto the brass dome. I then would take a Plexiglas-rod turn it to fit into the brass binnacle, shape the round top so that it is a nice fit inside the dome. In the next step I would part it off at the level of the compass-card and cement it into the brass dome. On the milling machine I would finally mill away the flat opening and polish the 'looking window'. A printed compass-card can be glued to the underside of the Plexiglas part.

Very nice work, as usual ! Sometimes, I am kind of the devil's advocat or perhaps the devil himself: would there really be a banister with columns, when there is a partition right next to it ? I would have thought that the banister would be put onto consoles screwed to the partition ...

Loading crane Somehow I seem to move two steps forward and then one step back again. For one part completed there are several that jump off the table to be never found again or that are destroyed during subsequent steps of manipulation ... Mechanically, the loading crane is a relatively simple affair, a rope winding drum driven through a pinion and cog-wheel, powered by a hand-crank, and for turning a worm-wheel drive equally powerd by a hand-crank. The console on which the crane rests is a quite complex part that was bolted together from several cast parts. The loading crane on the demonstration model in the former Naval Museum in Copenhagen The winding mechanism of the charging crane My first thought was to mill the console from the solid or rather to solder it together from several milled parts. I finally decided to put the laser-cutter to work and fabricate it from several cardboard pieces. On the bottom line, this was the easiest solution and compatible with the rest of the under-carriage The crane on the demonstration model in Copenhagen mainly consists of bright pieces of steel or cast-iron. Whether this was the case too originally on the prototype cannot be verified anymore, as no detail photographs exist. It is perhaps doubtful due to the continuous maintenance required to keep rust at bay. Although, the navy was not concerned about camouflage at that time, they were aware of the risk of early detection by the enemy due to bright metal part reflecting the sun. However, I allowed myself the artisanal-aesthetic license of bright metal, as I think it will be a nice contrast to the dark green of the gun carriage later. The actual crane was milled from a 2.5 mm steel rod. To this end the thickness profiles in both dimensions were taken off the original drawings and ‚stretched’ out straight in the CAD software. After milling, the part was softened in the flame, so that it could be bent according to the drawing. The hole and slot for the pulley were machined afterwards, as the part could break there during bending. The final shaping was done with silicone-bound grinding bits. Milling of the crane in the dividing apparatus Pulleys and forks form them are tiny parts machined on the lathe and the milling machine. Fork for the lower guiding pulley The mechanism of the crane consists of a good dozen of lathe-turned parts, that were, apart from their minute size, were not particularly challenging. The cog-wheel, the pinion, and the worm-wheel were turned together with their axes in one piece. On the photographs I counted 60 teeth on the large wheel, which gives, together with a diameter of 3 mm a module of 0.05. Making a single tooth mill seem to be too much work, so that I took the short-cut of just gashing the wheels with a 0.1 mm thick circular saw. It is only about the look and I did not intend to make these gears functional. Hobbing a worm-wheel of just 1 mm diameter was too big of a challenge, big of a challenge, but at least I tilted the axis 20° when gashing it. Milling of the pinion and the cog-wheel Partly assembled loading crane The final assembly can only be done, once the crane-console has been attached to the carriage and the whole thing is painted. To be continued ...

That is really fast progress !

A difference of 0.3 mm between the arbor and the sawblade-bore makes it essentially useless. The blades should be a 'sliding fit' on the arbor. This is the problem with equipment bought in the USA/UK in Europe and vice versa. It should be possible, however, to buy sawblades with imperial dimensions in the UK. I have been dealing e.g. with RDG-Tools in the past: https://www.rdgtools.co.uk/ Otherwise, an arbor to DIN/ISO specifications for fits (h7, I believe) would be needed.

Seems that many of us are working in 'marginal' areas - havn't touched a rock for decades. But then I did my graduate studies in applied geology and a PhD in environmental geochemistry. Spent most of my professional life in waste and mining legacy management. Over the past ten years or I have been advising the EU as an academic and self-employed consultant on raw materials and mining waste management policies. I must admit that I don't know too much about riverboats, but always had a weak spot for them. Most of my knowledge comes out of Mark Twain's 'Life on the Mississippi'.

I think the straps are only about 1 mm in my measures, so not a lot of room. However, I noticed that on well-made and installed hinged the most visible part would be the screw-slot (assuming that we are talking about countersunk screws). So I was thinking that one could make a minute chisel and simulate the screw-slot with a light tap of this chisel ... Working in miniature, I always have this problem that features are really too small to reproduce, but one notices that they are not there, when left off ...

Thanks ! I am actually a Geologist ...

Your wife is a sedimentologist or hydraulics engineer ? I've tried to recreate a similar situation, albeit for a tidal harbour, using some real silt/mud, for a ship sitting on a 'grid', they had in some tidal harbour for iron ships: